INTRODUCTION

SERIAL SPARTACISM

The Politics of Female Aggression

Can you name the serial killer who struck in the back of a military helicopter flying at 4,000 feet on a mission? Or the one who, at the age of eleven, killed two victims? Or the one who danced and socialized with a California governor? Some would know to name Genene Jones, Mary Bell, and Dorothea Puente—three females. But for the rest of us, we never even knew there were female serial killers. That is, except for that Monster lesbian hooker—the one they made the movie about—Aileen Wuornos. While the names of Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and Jeffrey Dahmer or the monikers of the Boston Strangler, Son of Sam, the Green River Killer, and BTK are familiar to all, ask us to name a few female serial killers and we usually stop right after Aileen. Were there others?

Yes, many actually. About one out of every six serial killers is a woman.1

As atonement for my past negligence in having overlooked them, along with Aileen, Genene, and Mary, I uncovered the legion of their serial killing sisters, and they are many.

I first came to writing about male serial killers in the wake of my own very brief and casual encounters with two of them before they were identified and apprehended. (One just behind St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow in 1990 and another in a New York City hotel lobby eleven years earlier.)2 At the time I did not know they were serial killers. I only learned who they were and what they had done months and years later through press reports and it made me wonder about the possibility that perhaps I had met more than just those two, and did not know it. Anything can happen once—that I understood and it did not surprise me. But discovering that I had met two—well, twice was entirely a different matter. It inspired all sorts of meditation on the statistical possibilities of life as we live it today. I wondered what the odds were for any of us to have at least once unknowingly sat next to a serial killer on a bus or a train, passed one in a crowd on the street, parked or shopped next to one, or stood behind one waiting in line.

As far as “my” two serial killers were concerned, I was living a relatively conventional heterosexual male middle-class existence, which I believed unfolded far away from the lonely corpse-littered roadsides, low-rent musty holes, and gloomy cellars where serial killers did their ugly horrible thing. I smugly asserted that my coincidental encounters had nothing to do with my being a potential victim for I was not in a preferred category for serial killer prey: I was not a young unaccompanied female or a late-night service employee, a street sex worker, a promiscuous player, or a child of any gender.

After encountering my first serial killer in a trashy part of town near a hookers’ stroll in New York, I contentedly described myself as “trespassing” on a serial killer’s hunting ground and getting “bumped” by a monster for going where I did not normally belong.

But I had gotten it all wrong. While I was vigilantly looking over my shoulder for a masculine threat from the seedier side of town, I should have been instead looking first closer to home—to whose bed I comfortably slept in and who slept in mine. If a white, heterosexual, middle-aged male ends up murdered, most likely his killer is a woman who he knows and knows intimately. When serial death comes calling on lonely, single middle-class guys with jobs and condos, or for that matter on horny old widower farmers, it comes with kisses and caring.

But all the serial killers I imagined myself randomly passing by on the street were always males, while women remained entirely off my paranoid radar as anything other than victims. I was conditioned to perceive the serial killer as a “he” and “she” as “his” victim.

That is not just a male point of view. Women until very recently had felt the same way. The presence of another female, even a stranger, still disarms many women’s primal fears of finding themselves alone with a male stranger. Our belief in an intrinsic nonthreatening nature of the feminine is deceiving both genders.

FEMALE SERIAL KILLERS: HOW MANY?

One in nearly every six serial killers in the U.S. is a woman, acting as a solo perpetrator or an accomplice. Of a total of about 400 serial killers identified between 1800 and 1995, nearly 16 percent were females—a total of 62 killers.3 While that might not be an overwhelming majority, it is not an insignificant number either—those 62 women collectively killed between 400 and 600 victims—men, women, and children. Three female serial killers alone—Genene Jones, Belle Gunness, and Jane Toppan—might account collectively for as many as 200 suspected murders. Another study, which included cases from other countries, named 86 known female serial killers.4 The appendix at the end of this book lists 140 known female serial killers and the number of their victims. More disturbing is that three-quarters of female serial killers in the U.S. made their appearance since 1950, and a full half only since 1975!5

Yet somehow the notion of a female serial killer has not entered our popular consciousness of fear or into our alarmed imaginations in the same menacing way that the figure of the male serial killer has. Women serial killers seem to border on the comic or titillating for many of us. Compare the monikers we give male serial killers (Jack the Ripper, Boston Strangler, Night Stalker, Skid Row Slasher, Bedroom Basher, Slavemaster) with the female ones (Lady Bluebeard, Giggling Grandma, Lonely Hearts Killer, Lady Rotten, Black Widow, Angel of Death, Barbie Killer, Death Row Granny). We have not been taking female killers seriously enough.

Part of the explanation is found in who we think female serial killers have been murdering and where. Many female serialists kill at home and their victims have often been family members or intimates: husbands, lovers, and children. Where one first nursed is not necessarily the safest place to be, yet how many of us are even remotely prepared to imagine our mom as a serial killer?

Other female serial killers murder at work in their professional capacity as trusted caregivers—nurses, babysitters, bearers of medicine, food preparers, and trusted social services contractors. Nurses killing on their job—killing where they belong: on the frontline of the war between life and death where people do die; nurses as angels of death with the catheter and syringe in their hands, nobody suspecting them, realizing that the death of their victim was anything but a medical emergency.

But in our popular imagination the serial killer lurks faceless after dark behind the wheel of his cruising car with a trunkful of rope and duct tape. We neglect to look beyond the sexy, cool cotton-white of the nurse who draws our blood, the cheery home-care worker calling on Granddad, the cute girl behind the deli counter slicing our bread, the miniskirted one with scissors cutting hair, or the one looking into our eyes from across the table while sipping her drink.

MONSTER—THE UNQUIET KILLER

Amazing how fast movies today can still change everything. Our collective awareness of female serial killers was recently taken up to a new level thanks to Monster, a 2003 movie starring Charlize Theron and Christina Ricci, along with a host of documentaries and television reports, all about Aileen Wuornos, a Florida roadside prostitute who was convicted of murdering seven men. A lot of promotion and commentary around the case suggested that Wuornos was “America’s first female serial killer.” Far from it—she was more likely somewhere around the fifty-seventh.

Wuornos was at best, perhaps, America’s first mass media celebrity female serial killer—giving countless interviews to press, media, and documentary filmmakers before she was put to death by lethal injection in 2002. What made Wuornos so unique was that she appeared to murder just like a male serial killer—she killed strangers with a handgun in a car and left their bodies in public places.

The one thing most of us believe about female serial killers, if anything, is that they generally tend to use poison and that their victims are known or related to them. Male serial killers stalk and hunt strangers; females trap and poison intimates—kill on their own home territory or on that which they share with their victim. The only really popular conception that has endured of a female serial killer through the decades is of the one who kills a string of husbands or lovers for profit. We even have a readymade moniker for her: the Black Widow.

For some reason we imagine the Black Widow as a creature of the past, from a time long ago when poisons were readily sold over the counter, marriage was often contractually functional, and record keeping of identities was haphazard. She could lure, seduce, marry quickly, discreetly kill, and vanish several times over before anybody would notice. When the Black Widow appears today, we think she only does so in Hollywood films in the guise of Sharon Stone, Kathleen Turner, or Linda Fiorentino. Mrrrrreow. So titillating—sex to die for.

What we rarely saw was the type of predatory sexually charged Ted Bundy/Green River Killer–type of female perpetrator leaving an alarming trail of visible corpses in her wake. Wuornos came closest to that. She was “the unquiet killer.” Unlike the typical female serial killer who leaves her victims expired in their beds or cribs or discreetly buries them in the garden out back, Wuornos dumped her victims’ bodies by the rest stops and roadsides of Florida’s interstate system. Corpses on the roads to Disney World! And unlike most female serial killers who historically murdered their victims in the capacity of a wife, lover, babysitter, nurse, or landlady, Wuornos barely had any relationship with her victims, other than hitchhiker, motorist in distress, or roadside prostitute with client, ironically the very same relationship that many male serial killers themselves exploit when they murder their female victims.

Wuornos, however, confuses our perceptions of real female serial killers by not only being a lesbian, but by being a particular type of lesbian. She was not the pretty and feminine L Word lipstick-lesbian, but a hard-edged dyke type, oozing a beefy, drunken-stoned, sloppy kind of muscular knucklehead violence we typically associate with males. As a serial killer, it is easier to correlate Wuornos’s violence with an overabundance of the masculine rather than with any intrinsic femininity gone awry.

THE NATURE OF FEMALE VIOLENCE

Wuornos exposes the core of our perceptual problem—violence is still almost universally associated with the male and the masculine. It was thought to be implicit in the male physique, a function of testosterone. Men commit violence; women and children suffer from it.

When women commit violence the only explanation offered has been that it is involuntary, defensive, or the result of mental illness or hormonal imbalance inherent with female physiology: postpartum depression, premenstrual syndrome, and menopause have been included among the named culprits. Women have been generally perceived to be capable of committing only “expressive” violence—an uncontrollable release of bottled-up rage or fear, often as a result of long-term abuse at the hands of males: Battered Woman Syndrome or Battered Spouse Syndrome. It has been generally believed that women usually murder unwillingly without premeditation.

“Instrumental” violence, however, murder for a purpose—political power, rape, sadistic pleasure, robbery, or some other base gratification—remains the domain of the male. After all, every male is a potential killer in the form of a warrior—and he only becomes a murderer when he misuses his innate physical and socialized capacity to kill for ignoble, immoral, and impolitic reasons. While the male is built and programmed to destroy, the female nests, creates, and nurtures. Or so the story goes.

History, of course, is full of instrumentally violent women: Valeria Messalina, Queen Boadicea, Agrippina the Younger, Lucrezia Borgia, Catherine the Great, Elizabeth the First, Madame Mao, Golda Meier, Margaret Thatcher. Some of these women can be characterized as serial killers; many had on numerous occasions killed and tortured serially, or ordered it to be done in the name of political power, patriotism, vengeance, or material greed and lust—and they did it as ruthlessly and obsessively as their male contemporaries—and sometimes even more so.

But most of these women are cultures, centuries, and classes distant from the modern Western woman—from the welfare moms in the Laundromat to the soccer moms in the mall and those without kids at all. It could be argued that as empresses or high priestesses they were beyond the common distinction of gender—they were heirs to divine power as manifestations of their political state. Yet it is precisely that deadly divine power that so many serial killers obsessively attempt to replicate through murder: power over life and death. It’s almost always about the power. But in the end, when we negate the feminine, all that remains is a potential murderer.

THE STUDY OF FEMALE AGGRESSION

We really do not understand much about female violence because we have only recently begun to pay careful attention to it. Of 314 scientific studies on human aggression published by 1974 only 8 percent exclusively addressed violence in women or girls.6 But that was before the frequency of female serial killers in the U.S. had dramatically doubled by 1975 over the previous two decades, and would double again by 1995!7

Proportionally there are more females among serial killers (16 percent) than females among total homicide offenders during the twenty-five year period from 1976–2002 (11.4 percent.)8 In general, violent offenses by females have been rising significantly. In 1987, women’s arrest rates for aggravated assault and robbery in the U.S. rose by 17.6 percent from 1978—and in some localities, like New York City, the rise was much more dramatic: 47 percent for aggravated assault and 75.8 percent for robbery. More recently, between 1992 and 1996, the rate of females arrested for violent crimes increased by 22.8 percent.9

THE DEPTHS OF SERIAL DEPRAVITY

Serial killing, whether perpetrated by male or female, has always stood in its own special corner of criminal depravity. Most of us can understand killing once—we can imagine a degree of jealousy, fear, desperation, rage, or even greed that could lead to taking a life. Most murderers do not know they are about to kill—it is not planned or intended. Many sincerely and deeply regret their act, make no attempt to evade justice, and rarely kill again. Serial killers, however, are opposite in every way from the common kind of murderer.

Serial killers are frequently aware of their intention to kill long before they commit murder—some fantasize about it for years and carefully plan it. After committing their first murder and “cooling off” from any emotions that led to it, serial killers are cyclically prepared to commit more murders, or—as some might argue—are compelled to kill again and again. (They become addicted to murder.) There is no regret or remorse—or certainly not enough to change their behavior. Many carefully review their actions, improving their plan for the next murder, going to extraordinary lengths to evade apprehension. A willingness or desire to kill repeatedly is something from the realm of evil—impervious to rational, scientific explanation. Our society can barely account for evil in males, let alone imagine it in females.

FEMINISM AND THE FEMALE SERIAL KILLER

If being killed by a female intimate is characteristic of a male middle-aged murder victim, then so is blaming feminism for it. The problem is that our understanding of the steady rise of female serial killers among us since 1950 has truly been confounded in its analysis by a new radical so called “second-wave” feminism, a form of “spartacism,” a tendency to associate female criminality with an aspiration for freedom from slavery and oppression at the hands of “the patriarchy.”

Ann Jones, a feminist historian of female-perpetrated murder proclaims, “A wave of attention to women’s criminality follows thunderously on every wave of feminism and surely will continue to do so until we can grasp the truth that free people are not dangerous.”10 Slave revolt is the crime, she is saying.

The early first wave of feminism addressed the “liberation” and equality of females within the parameters of precise and specific legal and constitutional challenges—the right to vote, the right to equal pay for equal work, family law equity, fair hiring, equal status, equal opportunity, and so on.

First-wave feminists (so-called “liberal feminists”) had associated the rise of female criminality with the notion of women becoming free to assert themselves as equally as men. Thus Freda Adler’s Sisters in Crime in 1975 interpreted increasing female violence in the context of self-empowerment. As in business, sports, the arts or sciences, the female as a criminal was not content to take second place in the hierarchy of crime. According to Adler, women were ready to compete with men on male terms and by their rules and that meant necessarily being as aggressive and as violent as the male criminal. This became known as the “liberation hypothesis.”

Adler’s Vietnam War–era antiestablishment liberationist generation of feminism, however, was flagging by the time her book came out. Moreover, the glee with which conservatives adopted Adler’s thesis in their opposition to female equality further alienated Adler’s liberation hypothesis from new emerging feminism. Adler was even seen as dangerous by some of the younger radicals in the feminist movement because her work was so eagerly cited by conservatives blaming feminism for the rise in female violence along with other family and societal ills.

A more radical second wave of feminists emerged, focusing on a darker notion of a deeply seated systematic victimization of women and womanhood by a biocultural conspiracy of a male “phallocentric heteropatriarchy” or the “phallocratic state.” According to this school of feminism, women will remain oppressed until males are transformed into something other than what they are collectively socialized to be today.

This second wave of feminism rejected the simple notion of equality between male and female, claiming that inherent in first-wave feminism is the proposition that all women want is to be like men—share their opportunities, have access to their world, be able to play by their rules, be equal to them—period. They maintained that this was akin to arguing that all African-Americans just needed and wanted to be white. Second-wave feminists called on women to liberate themselves not as individuals but as a unique collective feminine culture and to establish an identity of their own in the pursuit of an overthrow of an unyielding and oppressive male hegemony.

According to second-wave feminism, women are victims and males are collectively oppressors and women’s aggression should not be equated with any kind of female aspiration for equality with an oppressor.

Female violence, it was argued, was self-defense against systemic male aggression against women: It was liberational. And it was; the female murderer was transformed into the victim and the victim into the aggressor. As one feminist argues, “Women do kill. And their motives can usually be attributed to a very specific set of circumstances, underlying which are American principles of economics and property ownership, firmly legitimated by media coverage…women in America appear to have a very specific orientation to murder. Motivations may loop and repeat as social, political, and judicial landscapes do, but the basic issue is almost always one of survival.”11

As Patricia Pearson summarizes in her recent study of female violence, “By the 1980s, it was no longer a badge of honor to make a fist and wave it; it was more prestigious to weep in a therapist’s office. Therefore women couldn’t want to do something so antisocial and frankly offensive as crime. Women were not to be held as men’s equals in villainy, they were to be shown as men’s victims.”12

The absence of studies on female aggression and violence prior to 1975 was soon remedied by new feminist analysis, which fundamentally argued that all women are systematically victimized by the “heteropatriarchy” and its “phallocentric” institutions. Its common currency was to explain female-perpetrated homicide as an act of self-defense and rebellion against a long-standing conspiracy of rape and battering at the hands of the “phallocracy.” This vision was passionately popular among reading young women in the mid-1970s in bestsellers like Against Our Will by Susan Brownmiller in 1975 and Battered Wives by Del Martin the following year. The Burning Bed/Battered Woman Syndrome emerged in jurisprudence, explaining how wives can kill their husbands in “self-defense” even as their victims sleep soundly. The American Civil Liberties Union chimed in, saying, “Most death-row women have killed an abusive husband.”13 Could this be true?

A FEW TALES OF WOMEN ON DEATH ROW

Since the resumption of executions in the U.S. in 1977, a total of sixty-three women have been sentenced to death by 2005.* Eleven of them have been executed. (The last woman executed prior to 1977 was Elizabeth Duncan, back in 1962 in California’s gas chamber for the contract murder of her pregnant daughter-in-law, who she had buried alive.) Here are the brief case histories of the eleven women actually executed. You be the judge.

Instead of the supposed abusive husbands, many of the victims in the above cases, in fact, turned out to be children, other women, or innocent men. Four, and perhaps even arguably five, of these eleven cases involved a serial killer and at least four to six involved a type of materialistic Black Widow killer we popularly associate with a bygone era or the movies. In three of these cases it was unsuccessfully argued by the defense that the male victims had been abusers of the killers.

In fact, historically more than half (53 percent) of known female serial killers in the U.S. have killed at least one adult female victim and 32 percent have counted at least one female child among their victims.16

Yet there persists a tendency to interpret homicide by women as “defensive” or to politically contextualize it. One study of fifty female-perpetrated homicide cases, for example, insists that murder for women was “a resource of self-protection.”17 Yet only eighteen of those cases featured any evidence of abuse by the victim. The other thirty-two cases involve the murder of other women, children, and innocent men. The authors of the report remain eerily silent about that majority as if these cases did not exist.18

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, at the height of new feminist rhetoric, it was asserted that women just could not be serial killers—period. Some argued, “Only men…are compulsive, lone hunters, driven by the lust to kill—a sexual desire which finds its outlet in murder.”19

Another feminist critic, Jane Caputi, objected to gender-neutral language in the analysis of serial homicide because it “works to obscure what actually is going on out there, for the ‘people’ who torture, kill, and mutilate in this way are men, while their victims are predominantly females, women and girls, and to a lesser extent, young men.”20

Caputi explains that, “as these hierarchical lines indicate, these are crimes of sexually political import, crimes rooted in a system of male supremacy in the same way that lynching is based in white supremacy.21

Ann Jones also objects to the gender-neutral term “domestic violence,” arguing, “I suspect that some academic researcher coined the term, dismayed by the fact that all those beaten wives were women.”22 In the introduction to Women Who Kill, her “history of America’s female murderers,” Jones declares, “If this book leaves the impression that men have conspired to keep women down, that is exactly the impression I mean to convey…”23

According to Jones’s history, “the same social and legal deprivations that compel some women to feminism push others to homicide…society is afraid of both the feminist and the murderer, for each of them, in her own way, tests society’s established boundaries. Not surprisingly, the interests of feminists and murderers sometimes coincide…”24

Wow! They do, do they?

Put that together with her earlier quote about female criminality and free people not being dangerous.* How could one be but absolved of any culpability when killing for as noble a cause as freedom? What’s the word; femfascism? Or put simply, as Ann Jones declares, “The story of women who kill is the story of women.”25

Second-wave feminists view sexual violence against women as a political manifestation of the “patriarchy” and serial killers as its instruments. As one feminist theorist insists, female serial killers simply do not exist while the male serial killer is a martyr for the patriarchal state.

Just as the icon of the derogated eagle on the seal of the United State bespeaks this nation’s rape of the wilderness, so too does the endemic spread-eagling of women in patriarchal culture—in sexual murder, pornography, gynecology, and obligatory “missionary position” intercourse—point to the persistent and systematic punishment of women.26

Politicized terms are substituted for “serial homicide” and imply that the offender was exclusively male and the victim female: “gynocide,”27 “phallic terrorism,”28 and “femicide.”29

But then in 1990 along came Aileen Wuornos with her year-long serial spree of roadside murders of seven middle-aged and elderly men including a missionary evangelist, a child abuse investigator, a man on his way to his daughter’s graduation, and a police reservist. Now feminism needed to take a stand here. It did—it stood firmly behind Aileen Wuornos’s war of liberation.

One feminist theorist on lesbian violence, whose book is dedicated, “For Aileen Wuornos and for all the women who have been vilified, pathologized, and murdered for defending themselves by whatever means necessary,” declared, “Aileen Wuornos’s story is quite banal, an all-too-ordinary repetition in a culture of paranoid male fantasies that eroticize their worst nightmares. This time, however, one might say that the fantasy has crossed a certain boundary. The hallucination has been realized.”30

If serial killers are martyrs for the “patriarchal state” then Aileen Wuornos is a martyr for second-wave feminism. Wuornos’s defense for her murder and robbery of seven victims was that each had attempted to rape her. As she stated in her trial, “Everybody has the right to defend themselves. That’s what I did. These were very violent, violent rapes, and the other ones I had to beg for my life.”

In a television interview with Dateline, Wuornos vehemently spat out, “Here’s a message for the families: You owe me. Your husband raped me violently, Mallory and Carskaddon. And the other five tried, and I went through a heck of a fight to win. You owe me, not me owe you.”

Feminist analysis (and they were not the only ones guilty of it) sometimes misrepresented the scope of serial murder by citing unreliable and inflated victim statistics. Some claimed that there were nearly 5,000 serial murders a year in which most victims were women.31 That is a ridiculous number, but one that even today is still occasionally cited, and not only by feminists.32 The maximum total of all known serial killer victims in a 195-year period in the U.S. between 1800 and 1995 come to a total of 3,860.33 We have a long way to go to 5,000 a year! Other feminist scholars simply go silent when faced with explaining patently calculated, cynical, and savage murders of innocent men, women, and children by female killers.

None of this, I want to say, is to suggest that the extraordinarily high frequency of murder of women by their intimate male partners is a feminist myth. In the recent period between 1976 and 2004 in the U.S., a total of 30.1 percent of all females murdered were killed by their intimate partners, current or former, compared to 5.3 percent of all male murder victims.34 The problem is not how feminists portray the male murderer and his victims, but their analysis of the female killer and her victims. We were counting on the feminists to explain it to us, for in all those women’s studies departments at college they must have thought about it more than the rest of us. No? Apparently not, for they appear to be failing us badly. One would have expected something better than, “The story of women who kill is the story of women.”

This cult of the female killer as victim is not without its critics among the current rising new generation of feminists (postfeminists, a term recently floated)—the 9/11 postmillennium wave. Some of these wild new voices suggest that when female killers are invariably construed in media, in law, or in feminist discourse as victims, women are actually being denied their freedom to be human. Belinda Morrissey argues:

If a woman kills her male partner, for example, and can demonstrate his extreme abuse of her, then she might win the right not to be viewed as an active participant in defense of herself, but as her partner’s victim. This means that her partner must take responsibility for her acts of violence as well as his own; in other words, he is considered culpable for his own murder…Having at last taken some action to defend herself against her attacker and having succeeded in overcoming him, the battered woman is immediately cast as not having acted at all. She effectively loses the very agency and self-determination she tried so hard to gain.35

Perhaps this will yet represent a frightening future wave of feminism that will insist, as Morrissey’s publisher describes her book’s argument, “that by denying the possibility of female agency in crimes of torture, rape, and murder, feminist theorists are, with the best of intentions, actually denying women the full freedom to be human.”

Please, a little less freedom and humanity for all of us then!

Generally second-wave feminism tends to either ignore or bluntly reclassify female killers who do not easily fit the profile of a victim. The possibility that Aileen Wuornos is a serial killer, for example, is dismissed out-of-hand by one of her political defenders, who asserts, “The State says she is a serial killer. This charge seems implausible, given that the definition of a serial killer is one who kills for sexual arousal within a specific power imbalance.”36

Feminist critic Lynda Hart reminds us that Wuornos is on death row “for killing seven middle-aged white men,” as if that explains everything. According to Hart:

Wuornos is the masculine imaginary’s “dream come true,” her actions constituting a transgression of the boundary between the real and the phantasmatic [sic]. Having torn this barrier that preserves the phallocratic symbolic, Wuornos has become the “impossible-real” realized. And for that, I argue, she has been sentenced to death.37

DEFINING THE FEMALE SERIAL KILLER

There is absolutely no agreed-upon single definition of a serial killer. Male or female. There are as many definitions as there are experts in the subject, and the definitions include so far:

The notion that male serial killers kill only for sexual purposes and that they kill only strangers is long outdated. Serial killers will also kill for power, profit, belief, and politics and some will kill friends, neighbors, and family members. And female serial killers can kill for the same reasons as males do.

The murder of two or more people on separate occasions for any reason is serial homicide and defines a serial killer. This represents the consensus of the most current analysis of serial murder: that it is not exclusively sexual and necessarily fantasy-driven nor does it only target strangers. It includes organized-crime contract killers—who for the longest time were excluded from the definition of serial killer because they did not choose their own victims—and genocidal murderers, because it was thought they were driven only by ideology or military discipline. But in the final analysis, the psychopathology of both the contract killer and war criminal is similar to that of some “ordinary” serial killers among us.

Most of the women whose histories this book explores are serial killers by the most recent and simple definition: two victims or more on distinctly separate occasions with “cooling off” periods in between. These are killers who thought about it before they chose to kill again and again.

CLASSIFYING THE FEMALE SERIAL KILLER: THE FBI’S CLASSIC ORGANIZED/DISORGANIZED

The classification of serial killers is developing into a highly evolved system today. Female serial killers can frequently fit into the same male serial killer profile system. On the most basic level, serial killers are categorized as organized, disorganized, or mixed. This is a system that the FBI Behavioral Sciences Unit developed primarily as an investigative tool based on the assessment of a crime scene that the serial killer leaves behind.

Organized killers tend to carefully pick and stalk their victims. They plan the murder, they bring a weapon and restraints to the scene, they often take the victim away to another location, and they carefully dispose of the victim’s body and evidence. Disorganized serial killers on the other hand, often act spontaneously, blitz attacking the victim and leaving behind a disorderly crime scene. They frequently use improvised weapons they find at the location. They often leave the victim unconcealed and leave copious amounts of forensic evidence behind. Clinical mental illness is sometimes diagnosed in the disorganized offender’s psychopathology.

Each of these two categories of serial killer is associated with certain personality and character traits—organized killers might be more intelligent, keep a neat house, and be personable. They will use personal charm to trap victims. They will drive clean and well-maintained automobiles, own property, and be gainfully employed. Disorganized killers are less intelligent, less sociable, and sloppy. They will use force to overcome a victim. They drive junk cars and live in messy, filthy apartments and have sporadic educational and employment histories.

Since women serial killers more frequently kill acquaintances or intimates, they are most likely to fit the socialized organized profile—those who kill by cunning rather than brute force—but there are some differences, which we will see.

The FBI has a third mixed category of those serial killers who do not neatly fit into one of the other two categories—who show characteristics associated with both categories. Some critics describe this category as meaningless and cite it as evidence of the weakness in the FBI’s organized/disorganized profile system.

Using this system, virtually all female serial killers can be classified in the mixed category. As organized killers, females carefully plan and choose the moment they will kill their victim, they prepare the weapon in advance, usually poison, and they conceal evidence. Yet at the same time many know their victim and leave the body at the crime scene, a characteristic of a disorganized serial killer. Only on rare occasions does the female serial killer move and conceal the body. Unfortunately, the FBI’s mixed category is the least satisfying in making sense of a serial killer’s nature.

NEWER CLASSIFICATION SYSTEMS FOR FEMALE SERIAL KILLERS

Criminologists, less focused on investigative issues, tend to categorize serial killers by motive once it has been established. In this approach, the notion of gratification as motive is grounded in the entire spectrum of serial killer classification. There has been a debate in criminology as to whether serial killings are exclusively sexually motivated. This debate is particularly applicable to female serial killers as they rarely commit crimes characterized by gratuitous mutilation or by the sadistic sexual acts of male serial killers. Within the spectrum of serial killer classification, motive is an issue: Is a mob “contract hit man” a serial killer? Is the genocidal executioner or the terrorist a species of serial killer? According to criminologists Ronald and Stephen Holmes, they all are indeed serial killers. The Holmes classification of serial killers is strictly based on the gratification motive—what reward or profit, material or emotional, are the serial killers seeking when they murder?44

Serial killers can be classified this way into four principal categories, and three subcategories:

In only one of these categories is sex the primary motive for serial murder: for power-control killers who derive sexual gratification from the power and control they exert over a victim and who commit purely sexually charged homicides.

Sex is less of a motive but still an important motive in one of the three subcategories of hedonist killer—the hedonist-lust murderer. In those cases, the killer finds sexual gratification in mutilating or having sex with corpses, drinking their blood, or cannibalizing them. The killing itself is not the source of gratification, but merely the means to an end. These types of killers do not necessarily desire to kill their victim—they just want the victim’s body or to harvest some part of it. Edmund Kemper, who murdered, mutilated, and had sex with the dismembered body parts of eight female victims, including his mother, was typically a hedonist-lust killer. As he explained it, “I’m sorry to sound so cold about this but what I needed to have was a particular experience with a person, and to possess them in the way I wanted to: I had to evict them from their human bodies.” Kemper described his murders as “making dolls” out of human beings.45

There has been no recorded case of a female hedonist-lust serial killer, with two exceptions: that of the Renaissance-era Transylvanian Countess Elizabeth Báthory (1560–1615) who, it was claimed, bathed in women’s blood. The other exception might be a case in Texas in the mid-1980s. Ricky Green, a serial killer of two women and two men, claimed that his wife, Sharon, a preacher’s daughter, participated in the rape, stabbing, and bludgeoning with a hammer of the two female victims and that the murders were followed by the couple sensuously smearing and lubricating each other with the victims’ warm blood and having sex. Sharon Green pled guilty to murder but claimed she was forced to participate in the rape-murders as a “battered spouse.” Ricky was sentenced to death; Sharon received a ten-year probation term and a guest appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show televised on November 12, 1991.46

In the case of the Transylvanian Countess Elizabeth Báthory, the motive for her bathing in blood is ambiguous as well, as we shall see further on. She is said to have believed it restored the youthfulness of her skin, rather than deriving any particular sexual pleasure from it.

Thus, when feminist analysts insisted that there were no female serial killers, what they really meant was that there were no female power-control or hedonist-lust type female serial killers. We shall see, however, that much has changed since the 1980s and 1990s when they were making those assertions.

Beyond the two categories of power-control and hedonist-lust killers, there remain several categories and subcategories of serial killers whose motives for killing are not driven by sexual impulses. (Although that does not mean that sexual acts are necessarily absent in the homicides they commit.)

Visionary killers are driven by visions or voices to kill. For the most part they are clinically and legally insane, suffering with organic brain disorders and hallucinations and are usually a highly disorganized type of offender. They are rare and are often quickly apprehended.

Missionary killers have political, moral, ethical, or some other notional motives that drive them to kill. These killers target a particular type of victim who they believe should be destroyed, eliminated from society or punished: homeless people, abortion doctors, senior citizens, homosexuals, or members of a particular race.

Hedonist-thrill killers derive gratification from the transgression inherent in the act of kidnapping, torturing, and killing a victim. Rape is frequently a characteristic of these killings but it is an expression of aggression rather than the sexual drive.

Hedonist-comfort killers murder simply to profit materially from the victim’s death. The hedonist-comfort killer is, of course, the category with which we have most frequently in the past associated female serial killers. The stereotypical female serial killer remains one that uses her feminine charm to get close to her male victim, gain control of his property, and then murder him, moving on to the next victim—the Black Widow.

The most recently proposed new classification system comes from Richard Walter, a Michigan State Prison psychologist, and criminologist Dr. Robert Keppel, a veteran of fifty serial murder investigations, including that of Ted Bundy, the Atlanta Child Murders, and the Green River Killings. Their system is focused more on classifying sexual murderers, both single and serial, and is inspired by the FBI’s classification of rapists developed in the 1980s by Roy Hazelwood and Dr. Ann Burgess.47 For investigative purposes, Keppel and Walter propose the following classification of sexual serial killers divided into four categories:

All these various described profiles, however, are focused on and defined by male psychopathology. There is a range of newer categories, which seek to more specifically address female serial killers:

Another method of classifying female serial killers could be by their personality type. One study identified six behavioral personality types of women who were sentenced for both serial and singular homicide in California:

Yet another study focuses on the victim/offender relationship to categorize female killers as:

All these different categories can exclude each other or overlap. There is no single definition of a serial killer, nor is there a single universal system of categorizing serial killers, male or female. One thing, however, is clearly evident: the wide range of definitions and categories reflects a phenomenon of female serial killers far more extensive and diverse than we customarily thought existed.

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF FEMALE SERIAL KILLERS

Some general observations can be made about the sum total of female serial killers. Statistically speaking, female serial killers are better at it than their male counterparts. While the average male serial killer kills for a period of about four years before being apprehended, the female serial killer kills twice as long before she is stopped: slightly over eight years.51 Some female serial killers have been known to kill for over thirty years.

This is partly the result of our common reluctance to recognize a female as capable of sustained long-term violence and the fact that females often murder in their home or in hospitals where a death might not be recognized as unnatural and the female’s presence at the scene professionally related. Female serial killers rarely leave community-alarming bodies of young women or teenagers by the roadside. Described thus as “quiet killers,” their crimes can continue for years before they are even known to have occurred.

Another aspect of female serial killer longevity might be more gender based. Male serial killers, particularly sexually driven ones, appear to burn out and slow down once they are over forty years old.

With female serial killers, however, it is not unusual to find cases of women in their fifties and sixties still active and not even near peaking in their killing careers. Dorothea Puente was 60 years old at the height of her killing when she was charged in 1988 with murdering nine male and female victims. Puente is still going strong in prison: a collection of her recipes has been recently published.

Nancy “Nannie” Doss was 50 years old when she was arrested for poisoning her husband in 1954. In their investigation, police uncovered a twenty-eight-year-long career in which the grandmotherly serial killer apparently murdered four husbands in four different states, her mother, two of her four daughters, a mother-in-law, and other family members, by poisoning them with prunes soaked in rat arsenic.

At this writing, 73-year-old Olga Rutterschmidt and her 75-year-old friend Helen Golay face two counts of murder and two counts of conspiracy to commit murder for financial gain in the deaths of Paul Vados, 73, in November 1999, and Kenneth McDavid, 51, in June 2005. The women, who met decades ago in a health club, are accused of masterminding a $2.3 million insurance-fraud murder scheme in which homeless men were killed by being run over in staged hit-and-run incidents.52Arsenic and Old Lace is less a cliché than we think.

Approximately 68 percent of female serial killers operate alone, while the other 32 percent kill mostly with a dominant male partner, although there are cases of females dominating their male partners and all-female killing teams. It is in the female-male serial killer partnership that women are found most frequently complicit in rapes and sexual homicides, which are commonly associated only with male serial killers. Female serial killer partners are a whole category unique unto themselves and this book will explore this complex phenomenon in a separate chapter.

In terms of victim selection, we expect that female serial killers predominately kill family members and acquaintances. This has been true until recently, but today strangers are marginally the preferred victim of the female serial killer, followed by family or intimate victims.53 The problem in clearly defining an offender-victim relationship rate is that, like male serial killers, many females kill a mix of strangers / family or acquaintances / strangers, etc.

This book explores the different histories of a wide range of categories of female killers who murdered at least twice on separate occasions for a variety of motives. They are indeed all serial killers, for each have contemplated and chosen to kill again having already murdered once.

The motives and psychology of the killers will both vary and yet have common features among the various categories, and we will explore the various psychopathologies attributed to the offenders and their childhood histories when available. Like male serial killers, female killers are most likely both born and made, although the possible genetic and physiological markers in female offenders have not been as extensively studied as those in male serial killers.

The cult and culture of femininity has been central to this analysis in a way it is not for male serial killers. Female serial killers not only challenge our ordinary standards of good and evil but also defy our basic accepted perception of gender role and identity and, ultimately, our overall understanding of humanity. There are no politics invested in the understanding of male serial killers in the way there are in the analysis of female killers. While male serial killers appear to confirm the worst in masculinity, the question is not as clear for women. Do female serial killers defy the feminine or only confirm the worst of it? Is aggression intrinsic to femininity and how? The question of female serial killers should not be approached in a political or gender context alone, but in its entire human scope.